I am a musician and a music educator, and
that fact drives how I think and feel about
education. Practice, self-assessment, public
performance, and passion shaped my teaching
and my students' learning during my
K–12 and college teaching careers.
I mention passion because I believe
that inattention to affect underlies many of
the teaching and learning challenges higher
education faces. It is obvious that students
must devote concentrated time and effort to
their studies to have a reasonable expectation
of success. What is less obvious is the
level of responsibility teachers should
assume in creating conditions ripe for learning.
When students are motivated, when
expectations and affect are positive, better
learning results. Consistent regard for affect
prior to, during, and after teaching should be
part of our planning. It is telling that one of
the widely used assessments now helping to
improve higher education--the National
Survey of Student Engagement--is a measure
of student engagement, not cognition.
Of all the aspirations we can hold for
students, perhaps the highest is "love of
learning." This dynamic integration of passion
and cognition is, often, what leads faculty
and administrators to their careers.
Eliminate either passion or cognition from
the classroom, and you compromise learning.
Faculty may know all six levels of
Bloom's taxonomy of the cognitive domain.
Few, however, plan their teaching considering
the affective domain (receiving, responding,
valuing, organization, and characterization
by a value). Just as we are often encouraged
to plan for higher levels of cognition
(i.e., synthesis, evaluation), we should strive
for higher affect--at least up to valuing.
Assessment holds special promise to
influence how students learn and feel about
learning. Far too often, students don't know
what they are doing--they cannot judge the
quality of their own work because they have
not been taught how to judge success.
Musicians say "practice makes perfect," but
if you practice badly, you only get really good
at making mistakes. We must be taught how
to practice or we become discouraged and
stop trying.
Assessments can provide the guidance
that students need to improve the quality of
their work and how they feel about learning.
Teaching students to self-assess, using the
same criteria an expert uses, engages students
at the evaluation level of cognition.
Developing the ability to judge quality and
thus learn more independently is an
empowering, emotional experience that
increases the learner's motivation. Positive
assessment leads to positive valuing.
Pedagogy is another factor that we can
control to improve learning. Educational
practices such as learning communities, service
learning, internships, and undergraduate
research (among others) have been identified
as effective and engaging. By requiring
students to analyze and assess information
while solving problems, these practices tend
to motivate students. Not all assignments or
projects will be profoundly moving experiences,
but faculty can increase the likelihood
of exciting students about learning by making
strategic pedagogical choices.
Over the last decade, questions about
how well students are learning have resulted in persistent calls for assessment and
accountability. Regardless of which national
measures are used over the next decade,
local assessment will still be needed for a
variety of purposes, the most important of
which is to improve student learning. Given
that assessment is already a common practice
among faculty (e.g., grading using specific
criteria), it is not unreasonable to suggest
teaching students to use those same criteria,
thus transforming assessment of learning
into assessment for learning.
We know enough about how people
learn to do much better in planning instruction,
fostering learning, and gathering evidence
of achievement. If one's personal experiences
with tests have been less than optimal,
it may seem counterintuitive to assert that
assessments can bring enjoyment to learning
and keep students coming back for more. But
achievement and love of learning in all disciplines
emerge from the ability to work at the
highest levels of cognition to address genuine
problems and assess how well one is doing in
solving them. After all, my trumpet lessons in
college--with many rounds of teacher assessment
and self-assessment--were nearly
always the most enjoyable part of my week.
|
